‘But she doesn’t always lock it behind her,’ puts in Betty, who is evidently beginning to enjoy herself. ‘Now she locks the front-gate too,’ says Jacky triumphantly. ‘It’s perfectly thrilling,’ declares Betty, sitting up and growing openly interested. Betty is frivolous. ‘A prisoner, and a young girl. Can she be the long-lost princess of our infancy? And imprisoned by Mr. Wyndham! Oh, the terrible man!’ ‘She is of course a friend of Mrs. Denis’s,’ says Susan, with the grand air of one who will have the truth at any price, and who is bent on dismissing all theories save the practical one. ‘It’s the most natural thing in the world. We all know Mr. Wyndham told her he wouldn’t come down for a month or two, and so she is entertaining a niece or a cousin, or something.’ ‘She isn’t a niece of Mrs. Denis’s, any way,’ persists Jacky obstinately; ‘she’—with a hopeful, yet doubtful glance at Betty, whose latest idea has struck him—‘she is much more like a—a princess.’ Again he looks at Betty, as if expecting her to bring him through this difficulty of her own making; but Betty fails him, as she fails most people. ‘After all, I dismiss the romantic element,’ says she, nursing her knees and swaying herself indolently to and fro in the warm sunshine. ‘I incline now towards the supernatural. Susan,’ addressing her elder sister with due solemnity, ‘perhaps she is a ghost.’ Her face thus uplifted is sufficiently like Susan’s to let all the world know they are of kin; but Betty’s face, piquante, provocative, as it is, lacks the charm of Susan’s. Betty is pretty, nay, perhaps something more, for the Barrys are a handsome race; but Susan—Susan is lovely. It is useless saying her nose is not pure Greek, that her mouth wants this or that, that her forehead is a trifle too low. Susan, when all is said, when long argument has been used, remains what she was before—lovely. The smiling, earnest lips, the liquid eyes, the rippling, sunny hair—all these might be another girl’s, but yet that other girl would not be Susan. Oh, beauteous Susan! with your youthful, starry eyes and tender, mirthful, timid air, I would that a brush, and not a pen, might paint you! ‘A ghost! Nonsense,’ says she, now contemptuously. ‘But’—thoughtfully—‘what a queer story!’ And again, with a wrathful glance at Jacky: ‘After all, I don’t believe a word of it.’ ‘Oh, I do! I want to,’ says Betty, who revels in sensations. ‘And the ghost development is beautiful. I’d rather see a ghost than anything. As you looked, Jacky, did she vanish into thin air?’ ‘No; only round the corner,’ says Jacky reluctantly. He would evidently have liked the vanishing trick. ‘Very disappointing! But perhaps that’s her way of doing it. Corners are always so convenient.’ ‘If the gates are all locked,’ says Susan, turning suddenly a magisterial eye upon her brother, ‘may I ask how you saw her?’